A quiet boy drew and colored four seasons,
while the teacher lingered in summer, sensing the fall.
Winter, spring, summer, fall —
how we loved the seasons, all.
The leaves discover their color and drop their bodies,
opening a clear line of sight through the wilderness,
as we open the windows of time,
considering how we colored the seasons — just so.
In the comfort of an old, darkened home,
we look out the window and watch the seasons.
The next one will come soon,
the next one will come soon.
The quiet little boy who drew and colored four seasons
now senses how he is painted by them.
Each season, myriad things come forth;
each season, they illuminate the self.
Postscript
This four-stanza poem begins as an elementary school memory — an assignment to draw the four seasons. Childhood memories are colored with the same devotion with which we once colored paper. As the poem unfolds, we see that the boy’s drawing becomes a mirror: what he thought he was shaping was, in fact, shaping him.
Zen master Dōgen wrote in Genjōkōan:
“To carry the self forward and experience the myriad things is delusion.
That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening.”
The “quiet little boy” who colors the seasons eventually senses how the seasons have been coloring him all along. What he once saw as an exercise in depiction becomes an act of participation — of being painted into the world. The poem’s closing insight is a soft recognition that illumination is mutual — that life itself, in all its turning, continues to color us into being.
Primitive Joe 
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